The Moz Blog

Oh Ye of Little Faith

For those who may still be reticient to believe in the sandbox's existence at Google or think that a variety of non-related factors or filters may be affecting sites and that the SEO world has simply "created" this term. In defense, I offer up evidence that I can't reveal - that of hundreds of sites experiencing exactly the same type of penalization/filtration effects at Google. I receive dozens of e-mails each week and see more and more sandbox evidence all the time. If you don't like the name, I apologize, but the features are very real and very pervasive for new and newly optimized sites.

I also have some evidence "straight from the horse's mouth" as it were. These two incidents occurred over the past week at SES:

Incident #1:As many know, I arrived late to the conference due to fog in Seattle. When I got in, I went straight to the speaker ready room, where Matt (Cutts from Google), David Naylor, Todd Friesen (Oilman), Greg Boser & Dax (of Webguerilla), Elisabeth Osmeloski and myself were seated around several laptops. During the conversation, which centered around spamming Google (as Todd, Greg & Dave are or were all top-level spammers), Matt asked how succesful Google's recent efforts to stop spam had been.

Greg & Dave in particular had some choice words about the subject and I commented too. We all shared the opinion that ranking new sites at Google was a pain since the inception of "sandbox" and Matt noted (this is a near word-for-word quote) - "OK, so it's really working. Even on you (guys)."

I asked if Matt thought Yahoo! & MSN would adopt something similiar and he said that "it's not an easy thing to do" but didn't answer directly.

Incident #2:At the Google Dance 2005, the Meet the Engineers event was attended by 2 engineers in particular who worked in removal and identification of spam from Google's index. One young man (around my age - 25-28) spoke specifically with myself, DaveN, Jen & some others for a good while. I asked him what Google internally called the sandbox. He doged my question fastidiously until saying that he would try to get the spam team to adopt our term, "sandbox", so we could all call it the same thing. I asked him if they would continue using it and he said "definitely" or possibly "almost certainly" - I'm having trouble remembering which of those two. He noted in words I cannot remember exactly that they felt it was having a remarkable effect on the quality of the index. We moved on to other subjects after this, but not before he was vehement in explaining to me specifically that they did not design it to affect "all new websites", but that a "filter must be tripped" for a site to be "boxed".

From my perspective, not only does the sandbox exist, it was designed to do exactly what we see it doing - dampening the ability of websites in Google's index to rank for anything at all, based on the triggering of a filter that tags a site as "over-optimized" or "unnatural".

I hope that puts things to rest for those in the "sandbox" agnostic set.

2 Comments

Knowing that post is two years old, I still wanted to post a comment because this post has been brought to my attention on June 13th, 2008 on Shoemoney.com.

Sandbox: I am surprised this was still a debate even in 2005. Yes, there is a sandbox type filter that does look at different factors to figure out how new your website is and over time as your website gets more "age" in the search index, you website gets more ability to float and rank freely in the search engine's index.